Your kid is too fat, but don't worry, it's not your fault. That's the message sent by Councilman Eric Gioia who this week proposed legislation to ban fast food restaurants from opening within a tenth of a mile of schools.

That's awfully decent of the councilman. Putting his neck out there to protect kids from the evils of processed food sold by evil corporations who derive pleasure from marketing poison to our most impressionable citizens.

History has shown that middle and high school students would never do anything self-destructive unless they are goaded into it by large, heartless, national corporations, and that they would never knowingly ingest a potentially harmful substance, even if that substance would bring them immense pleasure.

Gioia would have us believe that long before fast food chains tightened their greasy grip on America's youth, kids would come home from school and reach for apples, oat brain, or steamed tofu for a quick afternoon snack before going out to play, and it wasn't until Henry McDonald grilled up the first Big Mac that the nation's meat lust really kicked in to gear.

We hate to be the one's to break it to Councilman Gioia, but people, and especially teenagers, love things that are bad for them, especially when it comes to food. The councilman has been no stranger to the healthy food bandwagon, having lived on food stamps for a week, and the council as a whole has been going on and on about radishes and beets.

Gioia and the other members of City Council may not understand the pleasures of an entire spicy chicken sandwich squeezed into a double cheeseburger (a delicacy with an hilariously unprintable name that can be bought at your local Mickey D's), but pretty much everybody else in New York City does, and that is the reason that fast food restaurants are doing great business and springing up all over the city. People eat this junk up.

Were Gioia able to legislatively require that schools be surrounded by asparagus carts on all sides and remove any fast food restaurants from a three-mile radius, kids would still run through the wall of healthy options and hustle down to the nearest Taco Bell.

True, they might burn off some of the calories from the double Whopper's they ate the day before, but Pol Position can assure our readers that nothing will keep teens from a fast food restaurant. Like flies flocking to a warm pile of ground beef, they would get to a burger joint. Ban them in Brooklyn and Queens and the kids will go to the far reaches of Staten Island for their White Castle fix.

But when will the madness end. They can keep extending the fast food ban outwards from the schools until the entire state is a burger-free zone, but then what will the legislators do? They'll have to start outlawing other foods that supposedly harm us everyday, ordinary citizens who are unable to make our own decisions. Next on that list will be candy bars and poison apples. (We don't know about you, but those are the things we look forward to nibbling on we get home. As long as we can wash it down with a bottle of Night Train.)

So, if fast food is outlawed, then only outlaws will have fast food, and we sure as heck don't want to make fast food illegal for teens, because then, White Castle hamburgers will be the "gateway drug" into a world of harder crimes.